Useless Interns and the Fragile Internet
The Open.Ed site has over 500 OER posts and about an equal number of blog posts, and I’ve been going through them manually in an audit, which has been time-consuming and repetitive.
When I’ve been asked about my job, many people have wondered why the whole process isn’t just automated. I’ve had a lot of questions on why I didn’t just use AI or code to scrape all of the data from WordPress and have believed that I had one of those ‘vanity internships’, where I get an experience for my LinkedIn but offer no real benefit for the company.
There are two very good reasons for this; copyright and the fragility of digital information.
Open educational resources (OER) are openly licenced, the majority being classed under a variety of Creative Commons licences, with a few outliers that have custom licences such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology licence or GNU and the Free Software Foundation’s Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL). Over time, copyright holders have the right to change the licence, where past reuse of the work is allowed but not any future versions. Some posts do not specify their licences, which leads to unauthorised use of the material that goes against the conditions that are set for use and modification of the work. An example of this would be if something is classed as CC BY-ND 4.0, which means it requires attribution of the work, and no derivatives of the original work. If this is not communicated well, anyone that modifies the work is therefore infringing on the copyright and can be held accountable through a variety of legal means. Each post and all of the OERs that Open.Ed links to are required to have working and valid licences, otherwise the service would not be working! There is no point in guiding people to material that cannot be used as advertised.
The second issue is that work can be removed. Anyone has the right to delete their own work from the internet, and I have seen this in my audit. This can appear in broken links where the host site no longer has the material, redirections to a new site under the same domain, or the domain is no longer in use. Even when links are broken, they do not exclusively appear as 404 errors (or DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN or 500 Internal Server Error). Often, websites have their own ‘Page not found’ page, which still counts as a working website page under the host domain. Artificial intelligence and code have not reached the level where it can scour links that seemingly work, but don’t have the content they linked to five years ago. AI specifically is prone to hallucinating the licences that these pages hold, because the rest of the spreadsheet has long lists of licences and it fits with the dataset it has been provided, rather than checking it manually and confirming the correct licence.
The internet is not permanent. If anything, it’s frighteningly impermanent.
Many people have deleted their Twitter/X accounts in the last few years which means embedded tweets no longer appear, websites change domains, people leave companies which deletes their staff profiles, massive open online courses hosted on platforms like Coursera and EdX no longer run, YouTube videos get unlisted, and cloud storage disappears overnight after a single unpaid subscription.
We are at a point in globalisation where the internet serves as a worldwide Library of Alexandria, but we don’t know when specific material just disappears forever.
The internet hosts absolutely gargantuan amounts of intangible knowledge, an amount that our little brains cannot handle conceptualising. Billions of people contribute to this library every day, from all over the world. We are at a stage where a student in Singapore can reach out to an expert of Applied Linguistics from Zimbabwe in mere seconds (Dr Sinfree Bullock Makoni, the architect of the African Studies Global Virtual Forum was recently awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Edinburgh!). The world is at our fingertips.
Wikipedia is something that I have gotten very invested in over the course of this internship. Working with Ewan, the University’s Wikimedian in Residence, I have spent hours poring over articles and journals to highlight the work of overlooked artists that history has forgotten. I’ve questioned how to cite old Fringe Festival pamphlets and been nervous handling massive archival newspaper collections from the 1950s at the National Library of Scotland. In the month that I’ve been an editor on Wikipedia, I have contributed over 2000 original words and received 27,181 views on articles I’ve edited.
People often take Wikipedia for granted, knowing that they can type a concept into their browser and find a whole article. It is an openly licenced, free-to-use and collaborative effort to document history and only exists because people contribute to it.
I’ve come to see the gaps in this digital encyclopaedia. In 2015, a paper titled ‘First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia’ was published, with the alarming fact that despite being nearly 50% of the population, only 15% of the biographies on Wikipedia were of women. Reframing this, men make up roughly the other 85%. There are biases present in who edits Wikipedia, with women being grossly underrepresented, and often undermined by the rest of the Wiki community. Names appear in red on Wikipedia when there is no article for a notable concept, and Women in Red is a volunteer project aiming to change that. In the decade following the establishment of this project, women now make up 20% of total biographies, an increase of 255,624 articles.
To be honest, I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this. I’m filled with so much hope with the interactions of minds made easier through the web, contributing to global knowledge, and despair with the current state of AI slop produced for no apparent reason but to drain our natural resources (looking at Fruit Love Island). But I can confidently say that my internship is meaningful, by preserving and making sure that material made to educate people is still openly accessible.
